And the wall came tumbling down

It was Timothy Garton-Ash, in his book Free World, who pointed out that two of the world's most significant post-war events occurred on 9/11. Writing the date in the European way, the 9th of November appears as 9/11. That was the day the Berlin Wall came down.

In the intervening years I have often been struck by how people even ten years younger than me don't appreciate the enormity of that event in quite the same way. Perhaps you have to be at least 40 to have any real experience of the Cold War world.

My awareness of international politics was shaped by adults' conversations about the Russian threat. When I began to read newspapers, retired generals were writing articles about how the Red Army could be at Calais in 48 hours and about the spread of communist influence in Africa and South America. When I grew out of Enid Blyton books I started reading the later Biggles novels; the ones where his arch enemy Erich von Stalhein transfers his loyalty seamlessly from the Abwehr to the Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung. There was no doubt that, in fighting the communists, Biggles was up against a threat every bit as bad as the Nazis he had battled in his earlier adventures. On the TV, Funeral in Berlin and Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy reminded us of the threat from Soviet spies.

On long journeys to Cornwall my dad would keep me and my sister amused by telling us to look out for cars from other countries. We'd tick them off in the AA book as we saw them. But there was no point in looking for PL, H or CS, my dad said. Those people were not allowed out of their countries so you'd never see their cars.

For my twelfth birthday I got a short-wave radio and, when I should have been doing my homework, I listened, fascinated, as the Eastern Bloc radio stations, like Radio Moscow, Radio Berlin, Radio Bucharest and the terrifying Radio Tirana, blasted their propaganda across the airwaves. As darkness fell, their blood-curdling call signs would drown out all other radio signals.

I was left in no doubt that, to the east, was a malevolent and brooding enemy, a land of grey days and cold silent nights, where secret police watched every move and armies massed, just waiting for the order to roll through the German forests and enslave western Europe. I knew who our enemies were and that they meant us harm.

Crazy though it may sound, these weren't just the thoughts of a child with an over-active imagination. Most people believed that the threat from the Eastern Bloc was real. It influenced both international and domestic policies in all European countries. Even in the early 1980s the Labour Party's commitment to unilateral disarmament was a significant factor in the flight of many of their supporters to the SDP and the party's disastrous defeat in the 1983 election.

The atmosphere began to change when Gorbachev became president fo the Soviet Union but even then, few people could have guessed just how quickly the Soviet empire would unravel. One by one, in 1989, the communist regimes collapsed. Apart from in Romania, the regime change was almost bloodless. But then the Soviet Union fell apart too. We discovered that the Red Army we had feared for so long had probably been incapable of launching an attack on the West for many years. Like the empire it had protected, it too began to collapse as soldiers deserted and sold their weapons to criminals. For a while it seemed as if Russia itself would disintegrate as its component A.S.S.R.s began to break away during the 1990s.

Like many people, by then I felt that we'd had too much of a good thing. I had spent my formative years wishing for the destruction of the Soviet Union but I was relieved when Putin stopped the rot and restored stability to the ruined Russia.

Looking back from 2009 the Cold War seems a lot longer ago than a mere two decades. Most of the former Russian satellites are now in the European Union. In the intervening years, I visited many of the cities from which the communist radio stations once prophesied the imminent collapse of the West.

I discussed Bulgaria's application to join the EU with a journalist and an academic, over a beer in Plovdiv's beautiful square. I had a night out in the trendy bars and clubs of East Berlin. I wandered in amazement round Ceauşescu's palace in Bucharest, the world's second largest building and a monument to oppression and forced labour. I whiled away and afternoon talking to a Czech woman and a Slovak man in a beer garden in Žižkov. I got drunk with Russian nuclear scientists on a train from Yekaterinburg to Moscow. I saw the office from which Stalin sent millions to their deaths and chatted with a Ukrainian about the threat of terrorism as we watched the aftermath of the Beslan siege in a bar in Irkutsk. And, perhaps strangest of all, I now chat to Polish people most days; they live next door to me. Cars with those once-rare PL registrations are more common than French or German vehicles in my part of London.

If you'd told me in 1979, or even in 1986, that any of these things would happen I'd have thought that you were mad. I assumed that I would never be able to visit eastern Europe and that eastern Europeans would never come here. Even now, although it all seems very normal these days, sometimes I still stop myself and think 'this is just great' because, compared to what went before, it is. I wonder what George Smiley, Harry Palmer and Biggles would make of it all.

In 1989 I knew some Germans who, that November, sensing that something was afoot, were heading home to Berlin. I was briefly tempted to throw some clothes into a bag and go with them but I had recently started a new job and had a lot on at work. I was at that point in my 20s when the spontaneity of youth gave way to the responsibility of age. I can't now remember what was so important at work but it stopped me from being there to see that hated wall come down and to witness what will surely be one of the most symbolic world events in my lifetime.

They are having a party in Berlin tonight, only this time without the mullets, bleached jeans and white socks. They are trying to get as many people as possible who were there at the time to walk across the Bornholmer Bridge. Earlier today, Germany's first Chancellor to have grown up in the DDR walked across the bridge with Mikhail Gorbachev and former Polish President Lech Walesa. Angela Merkel, the former FDJ member, is now leader of a united Germany's centre-right government. That is surely a measure of just how far we have come.

Comments

[Cleanthes]

"We discovered that the Red Army we had feared for so long had probably been incapable of launching an attack on the West for many years."

But whilst that is true (I had a fascinating chat with an ex-Sergeant from a nuclear/heavy artillery regiment - he reckoned he never saw more than 30% of the regiments vehicles able to leave their sheds), it downplays the mindset: the East Germans were actively and actually prepared for the invasion of West Germany and had all the stocks of East German ID cards for the newly enslaved West German population.

[asquith]

What is your view of this Ostalgie? I was commenting on this on a right-wing American blog I frequent:

http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/theanchoress/2009/11/09/ah-the-good-old-stasi/
("dry valleys" is me).

I would be quite curious as to what stance you took on this matter, as you haven't really touched on it today-

PS- I am 24 &, accordingly, have no recollection of those days myself. None of the old-timers I know has ever mentioned the political culture of the past, they are all fairly apolitical & I wasn't brought up to hold any particular set of views.

[Frank]

My abiding memory of the only visit I made behind the iron curtain, in 1979, was in East Berlin, Alexanderplatz, the Trafalgar Square of E. Berlin. There was a snack stall, with a large queue which was selling hamburgers, when these were sold out they fried up some sausages and sold those. There was no question of offering a choice.

[Steve]

Asquith, I'm somewhat sceptical about all forms of nostaligia. I can understand that some people feel left behind and that many of the promises of 1989 have not come to pass but I can't believe that many people would really want to go back to living under a dictatorship. Democracy and the market-based economy are not perfect but they must be better than dictatorship and state-capitalism.

Frank - you should go to Alexanderplatz now. It's a fine square with some good bars and cafes round about. I'm sure you can still get hamburgers and sausages too.

[asquith]

Yes, I quite agree with your premise. I am at pains to point out that those who hark back to the 50s would be the first to complain if they were shoved in a time machine & put back in those days- wouldn't want anyone thinking otherwise, though I have managed to give the wrong impression of myself quite a bit today.

I was merely referring to the slagging off of Bruni de la Motte. While she is something of a glib twat, that isn't QUITE all.

[Esmerelda Weatherwax]

You are the only other person I have ever met who listened to Radio Tirana. 7.00 - 7.30pm, half an hour of criticism of the US and the USSR for being imperalist running dogs, long live Chairman Mao and Ho Chi Mihn, finished off with 'an Albania popular song' which had no discernible words but rather a lot of bassoon. 5 minutes silence then the whole thing kicked off again in French.
My only trip behind the Iron Curtain was a week in Prague in December 1986. I needed a holiday after my father dies and my first marriage broke up somewhere completely different. I got a taxi one foggy morning to Karlstejn Castle and was terrified to see a lorry with men with guns on the back. They were local men on a hunting trip. I was surprised to find that guns were commonly kept in homes. I expected stern laws to prevent any uprising. Nobody had any respect for the police. The traffic cops were frequently harangued, much shaking of fists. With hindsight it did feel like it was unraveling, or not as tense as I expected.
My husband knew Berlin, east and west and Spandau, very well, having been stationed there for a spellmid 70s; when the wall came down he decided he had to return and show me what he remembered. We booked an off peak week which turned into the week reunification took place.
It wasn't quite the rousing celebration one might have expected. I think they had already realised what an undertaking the merging of the two halves was going to be.
My abiding memory is of the rows and rows of coaches down Kantstrasse, mostly Polish but some from Ukraine and the Baltic states, being frantically loaded with televisions, cigarettes and (by two women baby milk napies and a pram) in advance of the border being closed at midnight.
The Eastern sector reminded me of Shoreditch. Locals were demolishing a garage to supplement their stock of 'Berlin Wall' being sold in the Turkish Market. The slogan 'No Stasi amnesty' was prominent.
We still have some genuine wall in our garage which we picked up ourselves around Potsdamer Platz which was nearly completely flat.
My husband found navigating quite difficult because the wall had been his point of reference. I doubt he would recognise the place now.
I think the nostalgia is for the certainty. We know what happened in the past and we know that we dealt with it, whatever it was, unpleasant or not. The future, however bright, is uncertain.
It's similar to the nostalgia for east London during the crime reign of the Krays.

[Steve H]

Ha ha - Steve our childhood haunts us again. I remember that radio. You lent it to me for a week. Unlike you, though, I just have memories of being in bed with it still being light outside (we were sent to be early at 12 in those days) and listening to pirate radio stations. Music was always my thing though.